An Original Recipe

Margaret Sanders has spent months looking for the lost continent of Atlantis, and says she found it.

She studies the works of psychics such as the late Edgar Cayce.

She keeps her bed in the middle of the bedroom, angling it north-to-south to align her molecules with the Earth`s magnetic field. Sometimes she sleeps with her head at the north end, sometimes at the south.

But friends insist Margaret Sanders hasn`t flown east, west or over the cuckoo`s nest. They say the eldest child of the Kentucky Fried colonel is as sharp as a hawk.

``Margaret is a very intelligent person, and if her forays into the mysterious world appeal to her, then I think it`s wonderful,`` says Frank Wright, who runs the Palm Beach Round Table discussion series and lives in Sanders` condominium apartment tower in West Palm Beach. Amid all her mysticism, ``she in so many ways demonstrates she has her feet on the ground.``

For one, Sanders is an acclaimed sculptor who has portrayed many celebrity patrons, from Winston Churchill to Sissy Spacek. For another, she played a crucial role in feathering Kentucky Fried`s nest.

She founded, owned and ran Kentucky Fried Chicken of Florida, which began in 1958 with a takeout store in Wilton Manors. Although there are rival claimants, she says she was the first person to conceive of takeout franchises for Kentucky Fried Chicken or any other chain she knows of, and the original Wilton Manors owner agrees. If so, Wilton Manors is the Cooperstown of the industry and Sanders its Abner Doubleday.

Sanders, who is wearing all white, as her father used to do, says she doesn`t care if people consider her a creator or a kook. ``I like kooky people! Most of my friends find my little wild hairs exciting.``

Sanders has had five husbands, countless homes, countless positions in businesses and civic agencies, even three names. Says neighbor Wright, ``She`s Margaret to her friends, Maggie to her good friends and Melody to her very special friends.`` Why the nickname? ``She wants a world of melody and harmony.``

Sanders is 75, and, Wright says, ``At that age she could be like an awful lot of 75-year-old people who sit around and do nothing. She`s just an alive person.``

Perhaps the energy is genetic, for Sanders is a lot like the father she loved, feared and fought. Harland Sanders was a 19-year-old railroad fireman in Jasper, Ala., when Magaret was born, but a passion for success led him through dozens of jobs around the country over the years -- from lawyer to ferry operator.

Fortunes came and went fast, but nothing discouraged Harland. He was a salesman travelling to see a buyer when a bridge collapsed, wrecking his car and splitting open his skull. Squeezing together the fracture with his hands, Harland caught a bus and completed the deal. The gash eventually clotted and held without medical help.

After moving to Corbin, Ky., in 1930, Harland built a restaurant and what his daughter says was the Southeast`s first motel. Always an adventurous cook, the honorary Kentucky colonel got the idea of frying chicken in pressure cookers. With his daughter`s advice, he also developed a secret recipe. Today she says she knows what its 11 herbs and spices are but cannot remember the proportions.

The motel and restaurant flourished until the mid-1950s, when a highway bypassed the town. Harland, 65, promptly loaded his pressure cookers and spice mix into a car and began to peddle his method to restaurants, who gave him credit on the menu. The business was lucrative, but not nearly as lucrative as it would be after his elder daughter joined.

She was a hard sell, though. Sanders had always preferred sculpture to commerce. ``They`d always have to take mud away from me as a kid because I was always wanting to do something with it. But Father believed women should learn more useful pursuits.``

After his only son died at 20, Harland turned up the pressure on his two daughters. The younger, Mildred Ruggles of Lexington, Ky., ended up in Kentucky Fried. The older was rebellious, sometimes openly, sometimes secretly. ``I`d hide my clay from him,`` says Sanders. ``I defied him, but I was scared to death of him all my life.``

Sanders graduated from Berea College near Corbin and married a Kentuckian named Jimmy Adams, who now lives in Delray Beach. Adams joined the family restaurant business but eventually fell out with the colonel.

``The whole family was too much for anybody I married,`` says Sanders. ``Our family was all too close. There wasn`t a buck private in the family. Everyone was a general.``

Jimmy and Margaret fled to Louisville, where she studied art and, to help the country during World War II, worked as a ``forelady`` in a howitzer plant. After the war, the couple ended 14 years of marriage, which had produced three children.

Sanders went through a spate of jobs and secretly dabbled in art on the side. In the mid-`50s, the colonel sent her to Salt Lake City to learn the food business from one of the restaurateurs who bought his recipe.